Peter Sunde

Of the four, Peter Sunde has been the most outspoken about the case. That’s probably because between August 2005 and August 2009 he was the spokesperson for The Pirate Bay. Both on his lawyer’s appeal to the European Court of Human Rights and on his own website, he declares his “home base” to be in Berlin. Last month, Sunde wrote to Ars saying that he was in Sweden “for the moment,” but prosecutors haven't kept close tabs on him.

“I’m not sure where Peter Sunde is at the moment,” Håkan Roswall, the chief prosecutor from the trial, told Ars. “He has a lot of work in Germany.”

“It’s game over. They probably will serve time. They still have the verdict over their heads. Their lives are affected by this—they cannot come home.”

For years, Sunde has publicly trashed the Swedish justice system over the case against him. Sunde has repeatedly said that he will not pay any money at all. In a personal July 2012 plea to the government for a pardon, Sunde writes that this debt “practically means I don’t have a future in Sweden as a country, if I want to live off of anything other than breadcrumbs or the goodwill of my friends. This debt is equivalent to exile, to deportation. I will need to become an economic refugee from Sweden.”

He has declined donations from TPB supporters. “I don’t need much money anyhow and if I get money it will go to our opponents since I on paper owe them 10M EUR or so,” he wrote on his blog in July 2012. “I don’t want to feed that beast with any cash, especially not from people that really want to change what’s going on.”

Sunde has been quite active in other projects, helping to establish iPredator, a Sweden-based anonymous VPN, creating Kvittar, a digital receipts platform, and also founding Flattr in 2010, a micropayment platform that has become popular with a number of media organizations in Europe. Sunde has also traveled extensively on speaking gigs over the last few years.

Copyright attorney Monique Wadsted has told the Swedish Enforcement Authority that Sunde may still have financial interests in Flattr. However, in a letter dated September 17, 2012, tax inspector Elisabeth Lustig wrote to Wadsted and said that, following an investigation, her agency determined that Sunde was never compensated or employed by Flattr.

Still, Wadsted alleged in the Swedish newspaper Ny Teknik (Google Translate) that Sunde is connected to, or receives some sort of compensation from, shell companies (called Karbon Ventures and The Chromatic Trust) set up in the United Kingdom. Kvittar’s CEO, Anna Oscarsson, confirmed to the paper recently that Karbon Ventures, which she says Sunde controls, owns 15 percent of her company.

If that allegation is true, it wouldn’t be the first time that people associated with The Pirate Bay have used immensely dodgy transactions to obscure ownership and possible income of a business.

How has Sunde managed to avoid jail time, particularly given that he’s returned to Sweden several times in the last three years? It's not clear, and no one involved is talking. Earlier this year, Sunde was reportedly ordered to report to a prison called Västervik Norra for his eight month sentence. When Sunde and the others didn't report, the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (Kriminalvården) had the responsibility to act.

In an e-mail sent to Ars, a representative of the Kriminalvården explained the procedure. “If the convicted person does not report to the prison in question at the decided date or before, the Evaluation and Placement group issues a warrant to the local police office,” wrote Andreas Fällström. "The local police search for the convicted person locally, and report the result of their search back to the Evaluation and Placement group. If the convicted person not has been encountered, a national domestic warrant to all of Sweden’s police offices is issued. If the criteria for an international warrant lay at hand, an international warrant also is issued in connection with the national warrant.”

Due to privacy reasons, Fällström declined to comment on where any of the Pirate Bay defendants might be in this process.

For now, Sunde remains a free man.

Endgame

The money the four men owe may never materialize, and the site at the root of all the controversy has remained up. Still, despite the many delays, Lundström has now served his time, Svartholm Warg is in police custody, and Neij is currently targeted by the Swedish government. It may only be a matter of time before each of the four at least serves out his sentence.

“From a Swedish perspective, it’s [legally] game over [for all of them],” said Mårten Schultz, a law professor at Stockholm University who has closely followed the Pirate Bay trial. “Eventually they probably will serve time. They still have the verdict over their heads. Their lives are affected by this—they cannot come home.”